As I arrive, he’s laying out an impressive lunch spread of salads and carved ham and huge blocks of good cheese. There are already 385 mouths to feed in London alone, and almost 450 staff in total now, including the new US headquarters and testing base Wayve has just opened in Sunnyvale, California—Its first public use of the Softbank cash. It might have flown under the radar until that headline-making funding round in May, but this startup started up in 2017, and like most overnight successes has been a long time in the making.
That investment was seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars are emerging from the “trough of disillusionment” so common in tech when hype has to translate into application. Some of the biggest and best-funded companies admitted that autonomy was the toughest problem they were working on. Too tough, in some cases: Among many others, Apple, Uber, and Volkswagen have abandoned AV programs in recent years.
“In 2017, when we started Wayve, we were at peak hype cycle for autonomous cars,” Kendall tells me. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, this is a year away, and it’s going to be magical.’ But I could see that the technological approach that most were taking just wasn’t going to give us this future of intelligent machines that we all dream of. They thought of self-driving as an infrastructure and a hand-coded robotics problem. I thought of it as an AI problem.”
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